At the present time, CAD (Computer Aided Design) systems are used in many industrial domains to create three-dimensional Digital Mock-Ups (DMU) to be able to do the design, assembly and installation in a contextual environment, and to make virtual tests of devices before they are fabricated.
A three-dimensional digital mock-up is a sort of modifiable prototype capable of simulating the global behavior of the designed device. It can be used to improve the reliability of fabrication, to define appropriate fabrication tools and to optimize costs.
However, there can be some disagreement between the physical (i.e. fabricated) device and its digital mock-up. Assembly complications or interactions between the different elements of the device (related to measurement divergences, tolerances, oversizing, etc.) can occur thus creating disagreements with the model. This can make it more complicated to integrate the device into a dedicated environment, and in particular into a congested environment for example such as on board an aircraft. Furthermore, once the real device has been installed in its environment, it may be physically difficult or even impossible to access some spaces around this device without disassembling it. It will be noted that a device comprising oversized parts relative to the mock-up can interact with other nearby devices and possibly cause early damage or wear that is difficult to detect on some elements of the device itself or its surroundings.
It is thus important to inspect the fabricated device before it is installed. This inspection is tedious, long and expensive. It requires a complex analysis including making many measurements on the fabricated device and comparing these measurements with those of the digital mock-up. These measurements are fairly complicated in practice and their precision depends on the gauges or the measurement tools used.
Consequently, a purpose of this disclosure herein is to disclose a method and a system for making a precise, fast and automatic test of a device previously modelled by a digital mock-up.